Awesome summary, Jan! Thanks to all CouchDB team for making this amazing project better from year to year!(:
Now it's interesting to take a look back on the "Goals for 2013" thread. I think we've achieved most part of them (if not even all), haven't we?(; http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg23918.html -- ,,,^..^,,, On Fri, Dec 20, 2013 at 8:34 PM, Jan Lehnardt <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi all, > > I just published the transcript of my CouchDB Conf, Vancouver Keynote > (https://blogs.apache.org/couchdb/entry/the_state_of_couchdb), and I’d like > to share it with you as well. > > My thanks to everyone who helped making this year the success it has been! <3 > > * * * > > This is a rough transcript of the CouchDB Conf, Vancouver Keynote. > > > ## Welcome > > Good morning everyone. I thank you all for coming on this fine day in > Vancouver. I’m very happy to be here. My name is Jan Lehnardt and I am the > Vice President of Apache CouchDB at the Apache Software Foundation, but > that’s just a fancy title that means I have to do a bunch of extra work > behind the scenes. I’m also a core contributor to Apache CouchDB and I am the > longest active committer to the project at this point. > > I started helping out with CouchDB in 2006 and that feels like a lifetime > ago. We’ve come a long way, we’ve shaped the database industry in a big way, > we went though a phoenix from the ashes time and came out still inspiring > future generations of developers to do great things. > > So it is with great honour that I get to be here on stage before you to take > a look at the state of CouchDB. > > > ## Numbers > > I’d like to start with some numbers: > > - In 2013 we **added 15 committers** to the project, up to a total of 30. > Thats 2x the number of people regularly contributing to CouchDB! > > - The year isn’t yet over, but these committers already created 3x the > commits of 2012. And they have committed more than in any other year in > CouchDB’s history. > > - We have **shipped eight releases**: 1.0.4 1.1.2, 1.2.1, 1.2.2, 1.3.0, > 1.3.1, 1,4.0 and 1.5.0 just this year, that is up from one(!) last year. > - thanks to our new release schedule we are getting more features to more > people faster by focusing on small iterative changes forward. > > - 20% more JIRA tickets and 50% more GitHub issues > > We have made a lot of changes in 2012 to make 2013 a great year for CouchDB > and it sure looks like we succeeded and that 2014 is only going to trump that. > > I’d like to thank everyone on the team for their hard work. > > > ## Currently > > We’ve just shipped CouchDB 1.5.0 last week and it comes with a few exciting > new things as previews, for you to try out and play with and report any > issues with back to us. And that is on top of all the regular bug fixing and > other improvements. > > > 1. A completely new developed admin UI, nicknamed Fauxton, that is poised to > replace the much-loved, but increasingly dated Futon. I’d like to personally > thank the Fauxton team: Sue “Deathbear” Lockwood, Russell “Chewbranca” > Branca, Garren Smith and many more volunteers for their work as well as the > company Cloudant for sponsoring a good chunk of that work. Great job > everyone! Fauxton is going to be replacing Futon in one of the next few > releases and will give us the foundation for the next stage of CouchDB’s life. > > 2. Plugins. While it was always possible to write plugins for CouchDB, you > kind of had to be an expert in CouchDB to get started. We believe that > writing plugins is a great gateway drug to getting more people to hack on > CouchDB proper, so we made it simpler to build plugins and to install plugins > into a running instance of CouchDB. It is still very early days, we don’t > even have a plugin registry yet, but we are surely excited about the > prospects of installing GeoCouch with a single click of a button in Futon or > Fauxton. We also included a template plugin that you can easily extend and > make your own, along with a guide to get you started. > > The plugins effort also supports a larger trend we are starting to follow > with the CouchDB core codebase: decide on a well-defined core set of > functionality and delegate more esoteric things to a rich plugin system That > means we no longer have to decline the inclusion of useful code like we’ve > done in the past, because it wasn’t applicable to the majority of CouchDB > users. Now we can support fringe features and plugins that are only useful to > a few of our users, but who really need them. > > 3. A Node.JS query server. CouchDB relies on JavaScript for a number of core > features and we want to continue to do so. In order to keep up with the rapid > improvements made to the JavaScript ecosystem we have tentative plans to > switch from a Spidermonkey-driven query server to a V8-driven one. In > addition, the Node.js project has a really good installation story, something > that we had trouble with in the past, and includes a few utilities that make > it very easy for us to switch the query server over. > > All this however is not to blindly follow the latest trends, but to encourage > the community to take on the query server and introduce much needed > improvements. The current view server is a tricky mix of JS, Erlang and C and > we are not seeing many people daring to jump into that. In a second step we > expect these improvements to trickle down to the other query server > implementations like Python or PHP and make things better for everyone. For > now this is also a developer preview and we are inviting all Node.js > developers to join us and build a a better query server. > > 4. Docs landed in 1.4.0, but 1.5.0 is seeing a major update to the now > built-in documentation system. With major thanks to Alexander Shorin, Dirkjan > Ochtmann and Dave Cottlehuber who were instrumental in that effort, CouchDB > now has “really good docs” instead of a “really crappy wiki”, that are > shipped with every release and are integrated with Futon and Fauxton. > > > ## Beyond > > The immediate next area of focus for the CouchDB project is the merging of > two forks: BigCouch and rcouch. > > BigCouch is a > [Dynamo](http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2007/10/amazons_dynamo.html) > implementation on top of CouchDB that manages a cluster of machines and makes > them look as a single one, adding performance improvements and fault > tolerance to a CouchDB installation. This is a major step in CouchDB’s > evolution as it was designed for such a system from the start, but the core > project never included a way to use and manage a cluster. Cloudant have > donated their BigCouch codebase to the Apache project already and we are > working on an integration. > > rcouch is a what I would call a “future port” of CouchDB by longtime > committer and contributor Benoit Chesneau. rcouch looks like CouchDB would, > if we started fresh today with a modern architecture. Together with > BigCouch’s improvements, this will thoroughly modernise CouchDB’s codebase to > the latest state of the art of Erlang projects. rcouch also includes a good > number of nifty features that make a great addition to CouchDB’s core feature > set and some great plugins. > > Finally, we’ve just started an effort to set up infrastructure and called for > volunteers to translate the CouchDB documentation and admin interface into > all major languages. Driven by Andy Wenk from Hamburg, we already have a > handful of people signed up to help with translations for a number of > different languages. > > This is going to keep us busy for a bit and we are looking forward to ship > some great releases with these features. > > ## tl;dr > > 2013 was a **phenomenal** year for Apache CouchDB. 2014 is poised to be even > greater, there are more people than ever pushing CouchDB forward and there is > plenty of stuff to do and hopefully, we get to shape some more of the future > of computing. > > Thank you! > > * * * > > Best > Jan > -- > >
